The “Good Girl” singer accepted the award for Video of the Year, the night’s top honor, and said: “Thank you guys so much, everybody that’s been voting for any one of us tonight, I know how great of company I am in as far as the other nominees, and I just want to thank you guys for watching the videos and supporting all of us.”

Underwood, along with Brad Paisley, also won the first award of the night: Collaborative Video of the Year for their hit duet “Remind Me.” When their names were announced, Paisley jumped out of his seat and gave Underwood’s husband Mike Fisher a bear hug.

“Did you see my husband hug him first,” Underwood asked the fans when she and Paisley, who were seated next to each other, got the stage.

“I’d like to thank this beautiful woman for being in the video, otherwise it’s just a dork walking through the desert,” Paisley said.

The awards show, hosted by Toby Keith and actress Kristen Bell, kicked off with a mock election, pitting Keith and Bell against each other to see who would be the best host. Stars, entertainers, and politicians weighed in with their opinions with actor Matthew McConaughey saying Keith was cool because he played guitar but that Bell knew how to throw a party. Jon Bon Jovi commented “as country goes so goes the country.” And President Obama and Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney also took time to tackle the dilemma.

President Barack Obama and Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney will appear in the opening segment of the CMT Music Awards, airing live tonight (June 6) on CMT.

“The President and Governor Romney each understand the reach of the CMT audience, particularly on our highest-rated night of the year,” CMT President Brian Philips said in a release. “They’re each great sports, they’re ‘in on the joke’, and they each went out of their way to deliver great moments for CMT."

The CMT Music Awards take place tonight at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena and air live on CMT at 7 p.m. Central.

An outtake from the video, "Somethin Bout A Truck," by Kip Moore (photo: submitted).

When Kip Moore’s video for “Somethin’ ’Bout a Truck” was released last fall and showed the well-built country singer drinking beer in a field, playing guitar and taking off his T-shirt to frolic in a river with a brunette model, his record label saw immediate results. Sales of the single spiked 135 percent in the first week and views of the newcomer’s videos soared online.

The song recently spent two weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, with a boost from the video, which was watched on YouTube more than 7.5 million times.

But Gary Overton, Sony Music Nashville chairman/CEO, said videos don’t make hits — they enhance what’s already there. A successful video comes when a memorable song is wed to compelling showmanship and filmed on a budget that allows the record label to get the most return on investment, a number that could range from $2,000 to $200,000.

“As part of a comprehensive overall marketing plan, music videos are a great marketing tool to help us connect our artists with the fans,” Overton said.

That’s why Moore, who will perform “Somethin’ ’Bout a Truck” on the CMT Music Awards tonight, thinks his video worked — fans could put a face and personality with his name and then identify with the laidback evening in the field.

“That video worked because it’s very real,” said the 32-year-old singer from Tifton, Ga. “We honestly had a blast that day. We were honestly drinking. We got a little buzz. People could relate to it because they could put themselves back in that time and see it in us.”

Willie Nelson signs autographs for fans after the Country Music Summit (photo: John Partipilo / The Tennessean).

At age 79, Willie Nelson has just signed a major deal with Sony Records, released the new album, Heroes, with rapper Snoop Dogg and covers of Coldplay, and agreed to perform at Wednesday’s CMT Awards with an all-star back up group of Nashville’s emerging country singers.

On Tuesday, on the way to perform with the Nashville Symphony, Nelson made a pit stop at the Cannery Ballroom to address an audience of country music executives, most decades his junior, about making it in the music business as part of a two-day Country Music Summit business meeting.

In his younger days, the aspiring singer-songwriter spent a year on a Nashville hog farm.

“I’d been told all along this was the place to go,” Nelson said. “This is where music folks are, and if you had something to sell these folks here might buy it. It sounds kind commercial but that’s really the way it was to me back then. Because I really needed some help. I was from Texas. I needed to branch out a little bit. So I moved here to give it a try.”

As a songwriter he managed to enjoy some early success, writing hits for other performers, songs such as “Funny How Time Slips Away,” performed by Billy Walker, and “Crazy,” Patsy Cline’s hit.

But he ended up moving back home to Texas to kickstart his career as a performer, launching outdoor festivals in the months after Woodstock and inviting Nashville friends such as Waylon Jennings to perform in concerts that attracted tens of thousands of fans.

The performances eventually earned Nelson, Jennings and others influenced by folk and rock music — and the culture of the 60s — the nickname “outlaw country.” It was a label that Nelson said, “we knew we weren’t,” but nevertheless proved to be a stroke of marketing genius.

“It was the best sales idea anybody could come up with,” Nelson said. “It was genius. Someone else wrote that ladies love outlaws. That was good, too.”

Since then, Nelson has gone on to sell more than 50 million albums. He’s known for iconic American songs such as “Mama Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys” and “Always on My Mind,” a hit originally sung by Elvis Presley.

In February, Nelson announced he was returning to Sony Records, a label he had left in 1993. Nelson worked for several other labels in the intervening years, including Island, Lost Highway and Rounder.

At Tuesday’s conference, Nelson didn’t spend much time discussing his decision to return to a major record label in an era when many stars and fresh talent choose small, independent labels. Tim McGraw and Martina McBride are signed with Nashville’s Big Machine Label Group, for example. Headliner Jason Aldean is signed with the independent label Broken Bow.

“Art, generally, is a medium that delivery of depends on collaboration,” Yoakam said, explaining his decision to return to Warner Music Group, a label he left more than a decade ago. for deals with independent labels. He came back to Warner last summer.

“You have to have somebody who takes what you do to the people. It’s tough to handle out of the back of a car or a pick-up truck. There’s still an international network that somebody like Warner Music Group can use, a focused mechanism that the four majors (labels) bring to the table. That distribution chain is still there.”

Bell will be paying her first visit to Nashville for the awards, and told People she was excited to meet one of her favorite country stars, Miranda Lambert.

"Country music makes me happy," she said.

The show will be broadcast live on CMT, and but fans can watch the action unfold in person, too. Tickets for the show go on sale at 10 a.m. Monday, May 21 via Ticketmaster and the Bridgestone Arena Box Office.

Voting is open through June 4 at CMT.com and the CMT Mobile and CMT Insider apps.

The fan-voted awards show - now in its 11th year - will be broadcast live on CMT, but fans can watch the action unfold in person, too. Tickets for the show go on sale at 10 a.m. Monday, May 21 via Ticketmaster and the Bridgestone Arena Box Office.

Voting is open through June 4 at CMT.com and the CMT Mobile and CMT Insider apps.

With her new album Blown Away in stores next week, 2012 is already shaping up to be a trophy year for Carrie Underwood – now in more ways than one.

When nominations were revealed for the 2012 CMT Music Awards on Monday, Underwood led the field with five nods.

Little Big Town, who is up for CMT Performance of the Year at the awards show, announced the nominees live on NBC’s Today show alongside the morning show’s host Hoda Kotb and guest co-host Willie Geist.

The vocal group will also perform on the fan-voted 2012 CMT Music Awards, which will air live June 6 from Nashville on CMT and CMT.com.

“Can you tell everyone to go vote for us now?” quipped the group’s Kimberly Schlapman.

This time last year, Lauren Alaina was a cheerleader in Rossville, Ga., a small town near Chattanooga. She sang a lot and worked at CiCi’s Pizza. Scotty McCreery was a pitcher in North Carolina on the Garner Magnet JV baseball team. He also sang a lot and had exactly one Nashville experience under his belt: He and other youthful parishioners at First Baptist Church of Garner came here in the summer of 2009 on a mission trip.

“We were re-roofing houses,” he says. “I didn’t get a chance to go downtown.”

Now, the two can pretty much go anywhere they want. On Friday, June 10, they'll both be downtown, making their debut at the Grand Ole Opry and rubbing shoulders backstage with Country Music Hall of Famer Charley Pride, Randy Travis and others who had previously existed for them as radio voices, not as new colleagues.

American Idol has a way of doing that for people. McCreery, 17, this season’s champ, and runner-up Alaina, 16, are in Nashville this week, experiencing their first CMA Music Festival, introducing themselves to Nashville and beginning work on what will be their debut country albums.

The teens are wide-eyed about Music City and about entering a mainstream country music business they find equally exciting and flummoxing. Reached on the phone as she rode with a friend through her Rossville, Ga., hometown, Alaina was asked what the next year would hold for her.

“I’ll probably start out opening up for someone, or something,” she said. “That would be my guess. But I don’t know anything about any of this. It’s going to be news for me.”